This slender volume packs a punch well beyond its number of pages. With characteristic incisiveness, D. A. Carson works to dispel the confusions that surround current thinking about God's love.
After explaining why this doctrine is difficult, Carson distinguishes five different ways in which the Bible speaks about God's love: there is the intra-Trinitarian love shared between the Father and the Son, God's providential care for all of his creation, the love by which God yearns for the salvation of each and every sinner, his "particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect," and those aspects of his fatherly love that are conditioned upon his people's obedience.
Each of these ways of talking about God's love must be given its due, Carson warns, or there can be disastrous doctrinal and pastoral consequences. For instance, if we take God's love to be directed exclusively toward his elect, then "it is easy to drift toward a simple and absolute bifurcation: God loves the elect and hates the reprobate." Rightly understood, Carson admits, "there is truth in this assertion," but when it is isolated from complementary biblical truths, it leads toward hyper-Calvinism. So some young Reformed ministers today "know it is right to offer the Gospel freely, but … have no idea how to do it without contravening some element in their conception of Reformed theology."
Chapters follow on John's claim that "God is love," on God's love and his sovereignty, and on how God's love and wrath relate. By setting biblical passages in their contexts and understanding scriptural themes according to their places in redemptive history, each helps us to avoid some unbiblical thinking-such as recent egalitarian-motivated denials of the functional subordination of the Son to the Father or current "openness of God" proposals that deny God's unconditioned sovereignty because it is perceived to be incompatible with human responsibility.
Carson states that we must not only "gratefully acknowledge that God in the perfection of his wisdom has thought it best to provide us with these various ways of talking of his love if we are to think of him aright, but we must hold these truths together and learn to integrate them in biblical proportion and balance." Scripture's claims about God's love must neither be homogenized nor separated. The way to a proper systematic doctrine of the love of God runs through-and not around-the full diversity of its claims.
